Thursday, 26 August 2010

If anyone would like to add me ingame, whether it is to help me, or to train alongside me as a fellow RTS-tard, my ID isCurZed and code is 782 and I am on the EU servers.

On a side note, I have been recently winning ALOT more of my ladder games, mostly due to massively improved macro; as Day9 says, smoothness is key, and i'm slowly smoothing out my play and realising how important it is to leading to potential wins.

I shall be massing games tonight hopefully in order to move up a league or 2, we shall see!!

Tuesday, 24 August 2010

For those who read my first blog entry, this will be showing my progression from the lowly Bronze league up to hopefully Tournament level..

Over the past couple of weeks I have been studying SC mechanics a hell of a lot; i've been watching tonnes of Day9 Dailies, reading up on loads of strats and making sure my metagame is up to scratch.

Roughly 2 weeks ago when I first bought the game, I rushed straight into vs AI, and after managing to just about win on Hard I decided i'd jump into Online play..

Needless to say I got roflstomped.

My macro sucked, my timing sucked, everything about my play sucked.

2 weeks down the line we get to where I am now. Over this 2 week period I decided to not play online, however to simply play vs AI, but to concentrate on single aspects of my game to improve them..

From the simple tasks such as continuous worker production to knowing when to expand I practiced everyday vs AI.

I have just come out of my first ladder match after the 2 week break, and needless to say the training certainly has paid off.

Above is the replay of my first ladder match in 2 weeks.

Please, any further help will be appreciated, no matter how hard you are. I am still in bronze; on the large scale of things, I do still suck, I just need to know exactly where to tighten up, and how you think i'm doing as a complete RTS-tard!

Friday, 13 August 2010

I'd just like to dedicate this post to Day[9] and his awesome netcast. As a new player, his videos have become an invaluable source of information to me and I would urge any new player to study and watch them as soon as you have a grasp on the very basics of the game.

I seriously can not push the fact of how informative his videos are anymore - as a low level player I have been through all of his lower level play analysis and have been able to observe where I specifically need to work on.

Once your level of play progresses, he regularly analyses replays of the top players in SC2, this allows you to be able to practice imitation, and in turn, progress to potentially a top Diamond level player and possibly even further into a tournament level player.. the possibilities are endless.

So once more, I huge shout and massive thanks to Day[9] for creating such amazingly informative videos. Keep it up!

Thursday, 12 August 2010

After seriously sucking in my 5 placement matches (winning 2 out of 5) I have been placed in the Bronze league - for those of you that don't already know, this is the lowest league...

Before we get started I will let you in on what I play.

I decided upon playing Protoss as the units are awesome, and the builds seem really strong - none of this matters though if you suck at the game like I do!

In my placement matches I only really had one build that I knew (I figure now that perhaps I should have played more, or even all my games in the 50 match Practice league!), the build I attempted to orchestrate game after game was the 4 warpgate push using a proxy pylon - newer players amongst those of you reading may be super confused right now with all that jargon; basically this build incorporates 4 gateways morphed into warpgates once technology has been upgraded from a cybernetics core, and pumping units often to a proxy pylon - a proxy pylon is a solo pylon placed way outside your main base, as close as you can to the enemy base, in order to get units out and attacking as quickly as possible.

Now the reason I lost so much with this build isn't really because it sucks loads - it's pretty much due to my terrible terrible macro / micro abilities and my timing failures.

Tuesday, 10 August 2010

This blog will be outlining my journey from the ultimate StarCraft 2 "noob", hopefully into the realms of real competitive gaming, and will outline how well I am progressing and through methods I find work best.

Before StarCraft 2 I had never really played Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games; I was more of an FPS and MMORPG player - FPS which I had played very competitively at an early age in my life (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault back in the days!)

Before I purchased SC2 I decided to install my copy of SC: Brood War which I have had sitting in a drawer for about 9 years! Needless to say I sucked at even beating the computer AI!!

This lead me to researching pro gaming in StarCraft, and how pro gamers play, their different styles, as well as generally researching the game and its mechanics. I quickly stumbled upon Liquipedia (http://www.liquipedia.net) - an extremely resourceful website ran by Team Liquid.The site contains an astonishing amount of information about the first StarCraft - ranging from biographys of famous players, to different build orders for different races and different matchups (confused? we'll come onto that in a later post!)

And so this blog has been created - documenting my personal challenge, from being the complete anti-RTS player who really struggles at multi-tasking different units in a game whilst continuing to produce buildings and expand his base - into what hopefully will be a player who will be recognised within the StarCraft 2 community and who competes in various competitive tournaments!